Citation:
Abstract:
In 2016, when a landmark peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC) ended decades of armed civil conflict, over 30 percent of the revolutionary guerrilla organization’s members looking to rejoin civilian society were women. Motivated by the limited consideration of gender in the reinsertion of ex-combatants in civilian society, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork with women ex-combatants in Colombia to examine women’s ongoing reincorporation experiences. What experiences do women have in and after joining armed revolutions? How do these experiences shape the women and the civilian societies they join in the post-war period? My thesis explores what the FARC meant to the women who joined it and how its disbandment as an armed group following the 2016 peace deal transformed their lives.
In Chapter One, I discuss how many ex-combatant women have transformed aspects of their participation in the FARC—for example, vocational training, organizing skills, and confidence in their ability to occupy roles that are not traditional for women—into postwar gains. In Chapter Two, I analyze social collectivity in the FARC, arguing that collective identity was shaped and reiterated through ritual performances. Lastly, in Chapter Three, I discuss the nostalgia women feel postwar for this sense of collectivity. I argue that nostalgia plays two important roles in the lives of former combatants: first, it is deployed to bond former combatants in the postwar era, and second, it helps define individuals’ social identities postwar.